Chapter 3: Seaside Fitness

The gym smells like disinfectant and ambition.

Not the ambition of athletes — Seaside Fitness is not that kind of gym. It's the ambition of people who've decided that today is the day they become: better. Better bodies, better moods, better versions of themselves. The treadmills are occupied by women in their forties and fifties running from things they can't name — marriages, mortgages, the slow creep of irrelevance that middle age delivers with the subtlety of a BEST bus. The weight section is populated by men who grunt with a sincerity that suggests they're not lifting dumbbells but lifting the accumulated disappointments of careers that peaked at deputy general manager.

I've been coming here for two weeks now. Two weeks of daily visits — morning yoga, evening cardio, and the occasional class that Vandana drags me to with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever who's discovered a new park. Today's class is: Zumba.

"You'll love it," Vandana had said on the phone this morning. "Preeti ma'am is the best. She makes even the uncles dance."

The uncles. I can see them now through the glass wall of Studio B — four men in their sixties, positioned strategically at the back of the room where their lack of coordination will be less visible, wearing track pants that were purchased when track pants were still called "track pants" and not "joggers" or "athleisure" or whatever the current terminology was for pants designed to make sedentary people feel athletic.

I enter Studio B. The room is large, mirrored on three sides — the mirrors being simultaneously the gym's greatest asset and its cruellest feature, because mirrors tell you two things: how you look, and how you look compared to the person next to you. In Lucknow, I'd avoided mirrors. In Lucknow, I'd dressed in loose salwar kameez and told myself that comfort was more important than appearance, which was true, but was also: the philosophy of a woman who'd stopped looking at herself because the woman in the mirror was someone she didn't recognise.

Here, the mirrors are unavoidable. And the woman in the mirror is: fifty, slim-ish (the "-ish" doing significant work), wearing proper gym clothes now (black leggings and a grey t-shirt, purchased from Decathlon after the salwar kameez incident that Vandana had graciously not mentioned again), with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail that's greying at the temples in a way that her mother calls "distinguished" and her son Karan has never commented on because Karan hasn't looked at her — really looked — in years.

"Mar! You came!" Vandana materialises beside me, dressed in coordinated teal activewear that probably costs more than my monthly grocery budget. She's brought a friend.

"This is Jaya," Vandana says. "Jaya, this is Mar — the one I told you about."

"The salwar kameez one?" Jaya says.

So Vandana has mentioned it.

Jaya is: small, compact, with short hair and the bearing of a woman who has opinions about everything and the intelligence to back them up. She's wearing a plain black tank top and black shorts — the outfit of someone who comes to the gym to work, not to be seen. Her handshake is firm, her eye contact direct, and her first words after the salwar kameez comment are: "I hope you're not one of those people who talks during class."

"I'm not one of those people who does anything during class," I say. "I just try to survive."

Jaya smiles. It's a small smile — rationed, as if she has a limited daily supply and must distribute them carefully. "Good. We'll get along."

Preeti ma'am enters. She is: energy incarnate. A woman in her late thirties with the body of a dancer and the voice of a drill sergeant, wearing a neon pink sports bra and leopard-print leggings that on anyone else would be: a costume, but on Preeti ma'am are: a uniform. She connects her phone to the Bluetooth speaker — the speaker being industrial-strength, the kind that produces bass frequencies you feel in your sternum — and addresses the class.

"Okay, everyone! New month, new playlist! We're starting with Badtameez Dil because I'm in a good mood and you should be too. If you're not in a good mood, fake it. Faking it is seventy percent of fitness."

The music starts. Badtameez Dil — the Ranbir Kapoor version, not any remix, because Preeti ma'am has opinions about remixes ("remixes are what people make when they can't create original music, which is: most people"). The bass hits my sternum. The beat enters my feet.

And then we're moving.

I cannot adequately describe what happens to my body during Zumba. My brain knows the steps — or rather, my brain observes the steps that Preeti ma'am performs and issues instructions to my limbs. But the instructions are received by my limbs the way a bad translation is received by a foreign audience: the general meaning arrives, but the specifics are: wrong. My hips go left when they should go right. My arms produce shapes that resemble not dance but semaphore — the desperate signalling of a woman trying to communicate with a distant ship that the ship cannot see.

But here is the thing about Zumba that nobody tells you: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that I'm half a beat behind. It doesn't matter that the uncle to my left is essentially marching in place while the music plays around him like weather he's chosen to ignore. It doesn't matter that Jaya — who, despite her compact frame, moves with the terrifying precision of someone who has choreographed her own death scene — is doing the routine at twice the speed. What matters is: the room is moving. Twenty-seven bodies, all ages, all shapes, all levels of coordination, moving together to Badtameez Dil in a mirrored room in Bandra at 6 PM on a Wednesday.

The sweat starts at minute three. Not the polite perspiration of a walk on Carter Road, but the kind of sweat that has ambitions — sweat that begins at the hairline and migrates south with the determination of a Delhi-to-Mumbai migrant who will not be stopped. By minute eight, my grey t-shirt has developed continents of dark patches. By minute twelve, I am: a liquid.

Preeti ma'am transitions to Ghungroo. The tempo increases. The uncle to my left surrenders entirely and simply claps in rhythm, which is: a valid interpretation of dance if you define dance broadly enough, which Preeti ma'am does. "Dancing is moving your body with intention," she'd said on the first day. "Even standing still can be a dance if the intention is: stillness." This had sounded profound at the time. Now, gasping for oxygen while my legs produce movements that may or may not be Zumba, I think: the intention is survival. The dance is: not dying.

The class ends after forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes that feel like: an entire life. A life compressed into Bollywood beats and failed choreography and sweat and the particular joy of doing something badly in public and not caring — the not-caring being, for a woman who spent twenty-seven years caring about everything (what Harsh thought, what the neighbours thought, what the in-laws thought, what the sabziwala thought about her bargaining technique), the not-caring being: revolutionary.

I collapse onto the studio floor. The floor is cool against my back — the cool of polished wood, the cool that your overheated body receives like a benediction. Vandana collapses beside me. Jaya remains standing, barely winded, drinking water from a steel bottle with the calm of someone who has done this a thousand times and finds our exhaustion: amusing.

"Same time Friday?" Jaya says.

"If I'm alive," I say.

"You'll be alive. Zumba has never killed anyone." She pauses. "Though Preeti ma'am's Garba Special in October comes close."

We walk out together — the three of us, Vandana and Jaya and me, through the lobby past the front desk where Rohit (young, perpetually smiling, the kind of smile that gym receptionists produce because their job requires them to be: cheerful in the presence of people who are sweaty and unhappy) waves goodbye. The evening air hits my face — warm, salty, the particular Mumbai evening air that carries the smell of the Arabian Sea mixed with the smell of someone frying vada pav at the corner stall.

The vada pav smell is: dangerous. The kind of smell that defeats the purpose of the forty-five minutes of Zumba I just did. The kind of smell that says: you just burned four hundred calories, and I can put three hundred of them back with one bite, and the bite will taste like: everything you've been denying yourself.

"Vada pav?" Vandana asks.

"Absolutely," I say.

Jaya shakes her head. "You two are hopeless." But she stays. She orders one too. And we stand there — three women, ages fifty, forty-three, and (Jaya's age is unclear but I suspect: forty-eight), eating vada pav outside a Bandra gym at 7 PM, the chutney staining our fingers green, the pav soft and slightly sweet, the potato filling hot enough to burn the roof of your mouth in the way that the best vada pav always does.

"This," I say, mouth full, "is the best thing I've eaten since moving to Mumbai."

"Better than the avocado toast?" Vandana grins.

"The avocado toast was a hate crime against food," Jaya says.

I laugh. The laugh surprises me — not the fact of it, but the quality. It's not the polite laugh I'd produced in Lucknow at kitty parties when someone made a joke about their husband. It's not the performative laugh I'd given Harsh when he'd tell the same polymer chemistry anecdote at dinner parties for the fourteenth time. It's a real laugh. A laugh that comes from the place where real laughs live — somewhere between the diaphragm and the soul, somewhere I'd thought had been sealed shut.

The vada pav is hot. The chutney is sharp. The evening is warm. The company is: new, uncertain, possibly temporary.

But for now, it is: enough.